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Valve says it isn't subsidizing the Steam Machine's $1050 price because of its "religious" refusal to "build a more closed system" (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Are antitrust laws enforced anymore? (At least in the US)

I know some massive merged conglomerates who would be prime targets if so.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Line Khan made incredible headway in actually enforcing the (actually pretty good) antitrust legislation that already exists, but alas, she's not in the role anymore (since Trump entered office, I think)

    Despite this, I have no doubt that we'd see some pretty efficient antitrust stuff against Steam if they did subsidise the Steam machine, due to the efforts of the competitors to Steam.

    The thing is, I do think that Steam has a monopoly, in that if they suddenly turned evil, it would have a disproportionately large impact on the overall gaming ecosystem. However, they only got to this position because they understood that piracy was a service issue, and did legitimately better than most of their competitors

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Yeah, I don't disagree with anything said here. Steam has an effective monopoly, but not because of mergers or violating antitrust laws. They've mostly focused on being a good value for consumers and have invested more heavily in their platform compared to competitors.

    While Gabe is not perfect, I do worry when someone finally takes his place. If it's someone with a sole profit motive...we're fucked.

    Personally, I think one of the major reasons to also not subsidize the steam machine is that it would then be an incredibly attractive choice as a simple workstation pc for businesses. It would be the cheapest choice in comparison to standard dell, ibm, hp, etc workstations and could simply be flashed with whatever workstation OS they wanted to put on it. This would drive a lot of buyers out of the steam ecosystem, defeating the purpose of subsidizing. This is one reason for consoles locking down their, essentially nowadays, pc hardware ecosystems.

    Though, groups did recently unlock the ps5 bootloader and put Linux on it. Dunno how the performance lines up yet though

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago*

    Yes, they have a pretty dominant position, but they're not abusing it, at least not like many other companies, and that makes the difference. For example, they don't make anything exclusive to their own hardware or their own OS, their software can run on any distro, and their OS can be installed on any adequate hardware. And they don't lock the Steam Machine to run only games sold on Steam. And a lot of work they do under the hood is made open source (Proton DXVK, SDL, GameScope, driver work etc). It's mainly Steam itself and stuff part of it that's kept proprietary (and that's been relatively resistant to enshittification).

    Of course, the thought of Valve starting to abuse their dominance is every PC gamer's nightmare.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I bet they would be (against Valve) if a competitor donated to Republicans. I mean, they're keeping a finished bridge they paid $0 for closed because the owner of a competing, tolled bridge donated to them. Of course they'll open an investigation into a smallish leftish leaning company if a large donor asked them to.

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